Anticipating a new full length, Sonig reissues every side of non-album Lithops material on one disc, with unreleased tracks from the same time period. At least three of these singles have been long out of print, and as bittersweet as it is to see my $2 copy of “Tubino-see-through / Filterabend” (Static Caravan 1, clear-vinyl, hand-stamped sleeve, decal insert) swiftly devalued, having the rest of these immediately available is almost better than a new record from Jan St. Werner.
Dating from between ’96 and ’98, these tracks recreate golden years for the artist: the maturing of his duo Mouse On Mars, the beginnings of Sonig, a time when experimentation seemed to come as a natural tapering of the sound MOM made their own the day they first propositioned Too Pure with “Frosch”: a space-age tropical dub ambient, loosened an de-kitsched. With Lithops, St. Werner funnels the minor moments of MOM psychedelia through the bit machine and comes out with a shrouded, hermetic version, something breakable but ineffable in a swirl of binary infinites: the holy intervals of concrète sound dubbed, stabbed and guessed-at via synthesizer, feedback and cheap effects.
‘Kraut’ in an inherent lushness or a tendency toward organic motifs and phrasing only, early (and especially late) Lithops is a digital engine, meant for an audience with an ear for the graininess and the incomplete moments of a record like Vulvaland. Queries comes closer to MOM’s pastoral oddity Glam, or the outer bits of Instrumentals, alternating slow, wormy dub with the planetary drones and cries of feedback towards a backward psychedelic, lonely and vulnerable. This should be essential listening for any casual fan of MOM; it is a bare, twitching product where grooves and moods are scraped at, traversed, never noodled, just powerfully suggested in a cosmic dub concrète root exploration.
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